Past Lives
by Sylvr
Summary: The Team doesn't talk about their pasts. There's a reason for that. Five short stories about the very different worlds the team comes from. First up: Doctor Who!
1. Sophie

PAST LIVES

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Sophie was born to run. Not in the American sense of things, rock-and-roll and police chases, but in _his_ way, the grinning wild rollercoaster way. He held out his hand and she took it and they ran. It seemed like destiny, or opportunity, or chance, or fate. Any way you put it, it was perfect.

So they travelled across space and time, saving the world. Well, sometimes the world—well, occasionally the world—well—

Anyways. She was a thirtieth century girl, and she liked the no-slowing-down pace of life with the Doctor. She liked stepping through those impossible wooden doors and not knowing what was going to be beyond them. She liked meeting new species, and seeing first hand things that shouldn't—couldn't—exist. At the end of a long adventure, she liked a relaxing swim in the library. And even though the Doctor teased her about it, _someone _had to stock that enormous wardrobe room of his. He was just lucky to have chosen a lady with such excellent taste as a companion. Planet-of-the-Shoes, she's ready.

They had a good run. Wild and laughing and dangerous and terrifying and absolutely wonderful. She loved every minute of it.

But all good things come to an end. Eventually, she got stuck in a parallel universe, and he couldn't get her back without risking a tear in the space-time continuum. She just smiled at his technobabble and told him it was okay. She could take care of herself. She'd taken care of him just fine. Heck, she could save the bloody world! They both laughed, but then it was time to say goodbye. The Doctor was bad at goodbyes, so they skipped that part.

Sophie said thank you instead.

And then the hole in the universe closed and the Doctor and the TARDIS were gone, and so were her adventures with them.

But that was okay. She'd have new adventures.

She'd kill for a bit of psychic paper, though.

* * *

**A/N: I'm going to do a brief little story with each of the team having crossover origins, and where I think they came from. I have everybody but Nate already written-any suggestions for him?**


	2. Parker

PAST LIVES

* * *

Parker doesn't have a belly button.

There's no records of her before the age of ten; she seems to have simply wandered out of the woods right around that age. Her first act as a member of the human race was stealing a set of slightly large clothes off a line in someone's back yard. She put the shirt on backwards, but got the pants right. When she stumbled into a schoolyard, she couldn't speak English, but by the time recess was over and one of the teachers noticed the extra kid hanging around, she was speaking as fluently as her peers. When the teacher eventually figured out that the little girl had no idea who she was, where she was, or the name of anyone not on the playground, he contacted CPS and she wound up in the foster system. That lasted about six months. During that time, she acquired a stuffed rabbit, three new languages, an understanding of doctorate-level science, and, since the Olympics were on and she liked the bendy people, a new hobby—gymnastics.

Shortly thereafter she decided that the people she lived with were boring. So she took Bunny (it had taken her a while to understand the concept of names) and visited the store for some chemicals.

Explosions were fun.

* * *

**So…this one I didn't do much research on. But I was trying to think of a character that kind of came close to Parker, and I thought: Kyle XY. Kind of clueless about humanity, really fast learning curve, inhuman speed/strength/flexibility. Parker keeps showing off weird abilities in the show, like being able to tell depth by the echo of a sung note, or drawing flawless likenesses (which Kyle can do to) and predicting seemingly random laser patterns after only a few moment's watching. She also has that same sort of semi-alien cluelessness about normal human activity. I thought it kind of made sense.**


	3. Hardison

PAST LIVES

* * *

The slightly offensive term for what Hardison is is squib.

Well, squib is closest. He's got a little magic, just not enough to do much of anything. He was the no-mojo kid in a family of wizards, and he didn't like it. It was hard to play with kids when you couldn't use things like Exploding Snap cards or broomsticks. Instead, he was closest to his great-aunt Nymphadora II, who, like her namesake, despised her name. She far preferred to be called Nana. Nana was a witch, but she lived among muggles and practically never used magic. Instead, she preferred to use mundane devices to make her life easier, and it was in Nana's house that he first laid hands on a computer. She'd bought one just to see what it could do, and asked him to help her figure things out.

He'd figured things out just fine.

Within a year he could do things with that cheap little computer that his stuck up magical siblings could never dream of. That bit of magic that had never done him any good was enough to make the computer sing with supernatural power, run faster and smarter than any other computer of its time. At first, he was content to just play with the intriguing technology, challenging himself against the toughest firewalls he could find.

Then Nana got sick, and her pureblooded family refused to pay the medical bills for a traitorous muggle-lover.

Hardison had gone through a dozen or so computers since that first one, and he'd hacked into the Pentagon. It was no big deal to hack a couple international banks for enough money to cover her health care.

Things escalated after that. At first it was just what he needed, a little spare cash here and there to make things easier. Then he started pulling bigger amounts—it was mostly just a matter of adding a few zeroes—until he realized that he could do this. He could live like this.

He was fifteen. He was fifteen, and making forty grand easily in a week.

So he indulged. His magical parents didn't much care what their squib son got into, so he pretty much could do whatever he wanted. He bought himself an apartment, which he privately thought of as 'the Lair' or 'Headquarters' or 'Base'. He stocked it with all the best tech, then he stocked it with highly collectable comic books and massive libraries of pirated scifi/fantasy shows, and just about every anime ever created. He made the perfect geek heaven, and dropped out of high school to spend his time there, trawling the internet and sneaking money out of banks. It was safe and fun and clever.

And then someone caught on. Bad people—bad wizards. And no matter how good he was with technology, he couldn't do anything against a spell. He worked for them for a while, navigating the muggle world they were smart enough to know they could dominate.

Nana found out. There was a reason she'd been named after the war hero Nymphadora, and she was a formidable witch when she actually bothered to pull her wand.

The wizards left him alone.

But he knew it would happen again, so he worked for about three years on developing a gun that shot an EMP field that cancelled out magic. He only made one, and secured the blueprints so carefully no one but him would ever be able to hack his way in. Then he set out to make himself a name in the muggle , world.

Age of the geek, baby.

* * *

**A/N: I dunno. I thought about making Hardison from the future or some universe where technology is super-important, but I actually think that his skill set is unique. That he was always different. So, yeah, I picked a universe where technology was barely considered important at all. Let me know what you think.**


End file.
